How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

Jong-Fast explores the physical and emotional toll of caring for aging parents while simultaneously confronting her husband Matt’s terminal cancer diagnosis. The chapter opens with Jong-Fast observing the early signs of her own aging, including dark circles under her eyes that appeared around the time of Matt’s diagnosis. She reflects on how aging happens gradually and then suddenly, comparing the body’s deterioration to an unraveling sweater.

The narrative centers on Jong-Fast’s struggle to manage her mother’s declining mental health and addiction. Her mother, now living in a nursing home with Ken, suffered from severe dementia exacerbated by decades of alcohol and substance addiction. When her mother required an MRI, she became agitated and childlike, insisting that her brain was fine and that it didn’t need examination. Jong-Fast notes how she now speaks to her mother as if addressing a child, highlighting the role reversal that has occurred.

Jong-Fast provides extensive background on her mother’s lifelong substance addictions, particularly to diet pills and alcohol. She recounts traumatic childhood experiences, including sessions with a celebrity therapist named Mildred Newman who encouraged Jong-Fast as a child to confront her mother about her substance use. These interventions proved futile, as her mother would promise to stop but never follow through.